Finland Goes Old School with Shipwrecked Beer

Sometimes
we get nostalgic for the old days - the really old days, like early the 1800's, Finland. When Fins were Fins and beer was beer. After a long day at work at the tannery or of candle making or another early 19h century career, wouldn't you love to sit down
with a cold, frosty mug of old-style Finnish beer? Well worry no more; Finnish
scientists are on it!

It
turns out that the shipwreck found in the Baltic Sea last July contained more
than bottles of Veuve Clicquot and Juglar Champagne. There was also beer. Finnish
beer from the early 1800's to be exact and scientists at the VTT Technical
Research Center of Finland believe that they can recreate what they are saying
is one of the world's oldest preserved beers. Finland has a long brewing
history that dates back to the Middle Ages. Beer has such an important role in
Finnish culture that there is a day devoted to beer, Suomalaisen oluen päivä,
which falls on the 13th of October and commemorates the founding of
the first Finnish Brewery, Sinebrychoff.

Four professional beer tasters have
tasted samples of the cloudy, golden brew and found them to taste, unsurprisingly,
"very old" with some "burnt notes" and a slight saltiness. They also detected
high acidity, which they say could mean there had been fermentation within the
bottle at one point, which over time turned to acid. This means that the beer
was probably made by means of second fermentation - the same method used to
create Champagne - where yeast and sugars are added directly to the bottle. Or,
and this would complicate things further, it could have been made through
natural fermentation, which would mean the yeast used would have been naturally
occurring in the air. In order to recreate the beer, scientists have to
identify the yeast that was used, which could prove to be difficult.

"We
have seen yeast cells in it under the microscope ... but we don't know whether
they are live yeast cells," John Londesborough, a scientist on the team, toldThe Canadian Press. "It's like digging up a graveyard and hoping that you'll
find somebody there." That terrifying analogy should clue you in to the difficulty
of the process researchers are going through. If no live "bodies" are found,
then the researchers will conduct DNA tests and attempt to compare them to
today's brewing yeasts. The researchers have faith that this can and will be
done and expect to complete their research by May of 2011. There is no word on
whether the product will be available to an ancient-beer-craving public.